OnGuard: Spanlink's New Managed Services Suite

Spanlink Communications, a widely known Cisco contact center and collaboration partner, is entering the managed services fray. Spanlink's new OnGuard managed services suite provides a base level of service that can be extended to a series of a la carte, add-on services based on specific customer needs.

OnGuard's supported technologies and environments include enterprise call center, video and telepresence, but they also extend to the lower end of the stack, including switching and routing.

"We have been focused on Cisco collaboration and call center for a long time now," said Mark Langanki, executive vice president of engineering and operations at Spanlink. "We wanted to build a strategy that enables people to select the options that not only met the basic requirements, the ones that properly mapped to their extended business needs. So this offering is provided at two levels."

The extended offering, called Manage and provided on an a la carte basis, includes dedicated support engineers; patch management; management of adds/moves/changes; configuration, VoIP capacity, desktop and license management; disaster recovery and application feature testing; and consultative services, which can be purchased in the form of flexible hours.

"The Maintain layer is based on what it takes to get the basic job done. It should be the de facto standard," Langanki said. "Then we move to the more customized items through the Manage offering. We can take each element. We will make recommendations based on what we think is best for the customer, but we will leave the ultimate decision to them."

Langanki added that Spanlink expects to push further into the managed services arena during the forthcoming quarters.

"Our 2013 goal is to grow our managed services revenue by 30 percent in order to have more of a stable annuity stream," he said. "We have all the back-end systems already built. Our monitoring system can tell you if something is about to break before it does, and the tool automatically goes out and finds it. There's no human intervention necessary. All the asset management pieces are in place."

The Minneapolis-based company is also coming out with a white-label version that can be sold through other partners. The intention is to develop a revenue-sharing option that preserves profitability opportunities for both sides while allowing other partners to avoid the high costs of building their own systems.

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